Would this software help me?

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Would this software help me? Thu Mar 26, 2020 10:03 am • by rickwtexas
I'm looking for software to help me in my odd work life... I bounce between 3 locations.. home office and two different away offices. At any location on any day I'll create and/or revise upwards of a hundred files, sometimes the same file will get modified at all three locations, sometimes not. Over the course of a month thats a lot of files. I keep an UNFILED folder at each location and all of these get copied to an external drive... so at the end of each month I'll have UNFILED HOME, UNFILED T1, & UNFILED T2 folders. What I need is an app that can look at all three folders and move/organize them into one folder with just the newest version of each file.

I've tried just keeping each one version of each file on the external, but I typically work 13 hours every day, I'm always in a hurry, and files get saved to the desktop and creating duplicates are just the way it is. I've been doing this for 19 years, so I'm too old to suddenly change, slow down, and save files into individual client folders every time - so PLEASE don't suggest that. Yesterday alone I created 71 files with folders containing another 55 files (slow day), the additional time it would take to save every file to a client folder/subfolders would add another 1-2 hours to my day (I have upwards of 30+ different clients). I have to have files floating on desktop for fast access during the day. If this software will help me at the end of month to just make one folder with files to be moved to client folders I'll buy it immediately.

Just in case you think I'm exaggerating.. attached is a screenshot of get-info on the February/March combined to-be-filed folder, over 7000 files in it. https://ibb.co/JsSGkqR
rickwtexas
 
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Re: Would this software help me? Thu Mar 26, 2020 12:08 pm • by Mr_Noodle
I think you might be better served using a file syncing service like Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, etc. You can access it from each machine and have an up to date version no matter where you go.
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Re: Would this software help me? Thu Mar 26, 2020 12:20 pm • by rickwtexas
Mr_Noodle wrote:I think you might be better served using a file syncing service like Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, etc. You can access it from each machine and have an up to date version no matter where you go.


none of those has a sorting capability, thats just like adding more external harddrives for storage. Using any of those means at each location I have to save every single file, folder, font, etc to the same folder on the cloud, and then I'll still have to sort the files amid the 30+ clients eventually. And if the internet happens to be down I can't work at all. Plus while I'm working in psd or ai autosave will drag down the computer as I try and update files as large as 2gb each. Oh well, search goes on.
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Re: Would this software help me? Fri Mar 27, 2020 3:23 am • by fbolte
What I need is an app that can look at all three folders and move/organize them into one folder with just the newest version of each file


Based on the quoted sentence, I think what you are looking for is some kind of sync software, like

ChronoSync Express
https://apps.apple.com/de/app/chronosyn ... 1687?mt=12

In the past I had good experience with Synkron, which is outdated, but still runs on Catalina.
http://synkron.sourceforge.net

There are also FTP clients that have function for syncing folders based on different criteria.

Panic's Transmit: https://library.panic.com/transmit/tran ... nchronize/

ForkLift 3: https://binarynights.com

Also, I guess, good old rsync could be used for the job using the UNIX underlying of macOS. There are GUIs for this tool in the Mac App Store. But I can't say anything about them.
fbolte
 
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Re: Would this software help me? Fri Mar 27, 2020 10:47 am • by Mr_Noodle
Hazel might be able to help to sort the files once they are all consolidated but the consolidation step needs to be done and using a sync service will do that for you.
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